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organizing

Patrick McGuire recounts an organizing drive at a grocery coop in Winnipeg in the late 1990s, before the IWW developed its Organizer Training program.

I went to a Propagandhi concert in 1993 and decided to become a vegan. After becoming a vegan, I needed to find tofu, soymilk and lentils, so I started shopping at Harvest Collective. Harvest was a natural and organic food consumer co-op that had operated in the Wolseley neighbourhood (or the Granola Belt) of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada for about 20 years. The store was ridiculously small, crowded and always had some weird scent that I couldn’t quite place. Due to its relative longevity and success, a second location was opened across the Assiniboine river on Corydon Ave in the Little Italy district. Originally, this breakaway shop was a separate consumer co-op called Sunflower, but, due to poor management, it was eventually acquired by the original Harvest Collective. These two stores would come to be the first workplaces ever organized into the IWW and certified by the Manitoba Labour Relations Board in the history of our prairie province.

Today's episode features a conversation with some members of Feminist Action Hamilton, an anyone-except-cis-men collective organizing around anarchist principles. We talk about some of the actions and workshops Feminist Action Hamilton has been organizing over the past year; feelings and motivations around creating an organizing space without cis men; intentions and desires to support each other, learn together, and take action, and some of the messiness and difficulties of organizing when you're not pretending to have all the answers.

Someone once told me that I should only begin projects I can complete by myself.

Organizing is the antithesis of such advice. The preferred method of bringing ideas to life for the organizer is a church-like mass.

The focus becomes the abacus. The task itself is secondary, and as a result leaves a vacancy easily filled by fantasy. The greater the fantasy, the more powerless the individual, and the more reliant on the organizer they become.